I was 8 years old in 1969. My dad was a huge fan of the US/NASA space program. One of my earliest memories was watching an early Gemini launch with him and the many others that followed. He’d get me up early or let me stay up way past my bedtime so we could watch them together.
We had a subscription to National Geographic back then and we got a big map of the Earth and a big map of the Moon as part of our subscription. I also got, IIRC from a box of Captain Crunch cereal, a plastic model of the Saturn rocket and the Apollo 11 orbiter and lunar lander. I also “borrowed” the “ships” from my older brother’s Battleship game.
My dad got a big kick watching me play.
I laid the map of the Earth on the floor on one side of the living room, and the map of the Moon on the opposite side and “practiced” the launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, I even put my transistor radio on the map near Huston TX to represent Huston Control and I’d do Mission Control voices that I had memorized from all the previous Apollo missions.
Then I’d circle the Earth map several times to represent the initial orbit then walk over to the Moon map, circle around that several times and then separate the lander from the orbiter and land on the exact spot on the Moon map where Apollo 11 was going to land.
Then I’d blast off from the Moon, dock with the orbiter and make the long journey back to the other side of the living room and splash down in the Pacific where my brother’s “Battleship” navy was waiting to pick our astronauts up. I’d also yell, “Take that you Commie Ruskies!” My dad got an especially big kick out of that.
My “practice” ended up being pretty accurate to the real thing.
I only saw my dad cry twice in my life – when my mother died in 1996 and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in 1969.
That is such a delightful story. I enjoyed reading it.
Plus, your recollection of the excellent details is such a contrast my lack of memory of most everything in childhood, or even my life on the whole. It’s basically a blur, with a few points of interest, not having much in the way of detail.
I suspect it was because there was no “there” there to remember!
I sure was a big Apollo 11 fan, though, even at such a young age. It’s carried on through all of these years.